


bad tan lines will tell who's back from hell

by sternenrotz



Series: broken hearts hurt but they make us strong (queer horror verse) [6]
Category: The Horrors (Band)
Genre: Airports, Gen, Implied/Referenced Drug Use, Jealousy, M/M, Trans Female Character, Trans Male Character, deliberate anachronisms for humour, relationship drama
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-01-10
Updated: 2018-01-10
Packaged: 2019-03-03 05:24:36
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,148
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13334385
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/sternenrotz/pseuds/sternenrotz
Summary: Tom wants some peace and quiet while waiting to board their flight, but the rest of his band makes that rather difficult.





	bad tan lines will tell who's back from hell

**Author's Note:**

> titled after "50 Altered States" by The Matches.
> 
> set in November 2006, at the end of The Horrors' first ever American tour. as usual, Josh and Joe are trans guys, although it doesn't come up much, Rhys is a trans girl and her chosen name is Dilys.

This departure lounge is mercilessly bright and the time is so early Tom isn’t sure whether it could technically still be considered _late_. Dilys finishes snapping her fingers to fill out the static-buzz silence.

“Joe. Coffin. Joseph. Jonathan?”

“Huhm?”

“Josephine.” She clicks her fingers again. “Are you listening to me?”

“I am.”

“Right. I was just thinking. You know these ITV trash dating shows, like, _Dinner Date_ , I was just thinking. If you were on _Dinner Date_ …”

“What?”

“ _Dinner Date_. The dating show. If you were on _Dinner Date_ …”

“I heard you.”

“Okay. So…”

“Why am I on _Dinner Date_? I’ve a girlfriend.”

“You do, Kit.”

“You’re my girlfriend. You know that?”

“I know.”

Dilys leans down to smush Joe’s face in her thumb and forefinger and gives him a sloppy kiss. Unfortunately, Tom sips his coffee at that exact moment, so he almost throws up. He may not even be hungover, but still riding on the last coattails of drunkenness, but that doesn’t really make a difference at this moment.

“It’s a game.”

“Okay.”

“If you were a candidate on _Dinner Date_ as one of the blind dates, what’s the menu you’d want to cook?”

Joe blinks for a long second, and Tom decides to look somewhere else.

“If you had to cook a three-course meal…”

A few seats down the waiting-room-style benches, their crew are crowded around something their manager, really one of Faris’ girlfriends who has a media degree, is showing them on a laptop. Last night’s show went fantastically, but Tom has had enough of being in a band for a bit. All he craves anymore is English soil under his feet and his bed.

“I’d probably make a really good carrot cake for desserts. People like carrot cake.”

Beyond the crew, there’s Faris and Josh, sat close enough their arms touch with one of Josh’s legs thrown over Faris’ so the moleskine rests on his knee. Their messy heads tangle together as they whisper to each other, but that soon turns into kissing, and then back.

“For my starters. You know those potato skins, but mushrooms? Filled mushrooms. With ham and blue cheese, caramelised onions, no, no, scallions. Fresh scallions on top.”

Josh’s mouth moves incessantly, but Tom can’t see Faris’ face from this angle. His body looks limp in its chair, head sagged towards Josh’s, so it’s obvious they both got even less sleep than Tom did. The back of Josh’s head lacks the telltale matted part of missionary, so they probably did it from behind or cowboy style last night, and Tom hates that he can imagine it perfectly.

“And chicken drumsticks. Honey glazed. With hand-cut chips and a nice salad, like, a coleslaw salad?”

“That’s a lovely menu, babes.”

“Thank you.”

Tom begrudgingly realises that Joe and Dilys are his least nauseating option, even if they do kiss again when he looks back at them. They’re stacked on top of each other, dressed like twin horrors in matching black outfits, although Dilys is wearing her beret to hide her unwashed hair again.

“Here. Are you still chewing your gum?”

Dilys passes Joe the bottle of water they’re sharing between them, and her eyes very suddenly refocus onto Tom’s face.

“Tomethy. Thomas.”

Her fingers snap in front of his nose now, as if there was a way for Tom to be unaware of her presence.

“Tominic?”

Maybe he should say something. “Yes?”

“Tom.” The snappy hand stops and lays itself on top of his arm now. “If you were a blind date candidate on the ITV format _Dinner Date_ , and you had to cook a three-course menu for a lucky bloke or bird…”

“I don’t know. I think it really depends on the person, like, some people might prefer a salad over a heftier appetiser…” Tom hasn’t seen a single episode of _Dinner Date_.

“But it’s a _blind date_. The point of it’s you won’t know anything about your lucky lady, and you’re gonna have to impress her with just your cooking skills and not your magic weedy dick.”

Tom feels his ears going hot at that, and he doesn’t know if he _should_.  This is a stupid game.

“This is a stupid game,” he says. Then, he repeats, “I don’t know.” He has never cooked a three-course meal in his life. “Probably a Caesar salad. Both grilled chicken and bacon…”

“Bo-ring,” Dilys cuts in and clicks her fingers a few more times. “Next topic. If you were on _Take Me Out_ as the guy, what song would you want to play when you’re coming down the elevator?”

Actually, Tom doesn’t think he’s heard of any of the programmes Dilys ever talks about. He diplomatically says, “I wouldn’t go on _Take Me Out_ if you paid me.”

Dilys leans over from her perch on her boyfriend’s lap to press a messy kiss to Tom’s lips. Before Joe can pout about it, she turns her head to kiss him as well, and he next leans towards Tom to complete the circle. His mouth feels like cotton mouth.

“Love all round,” Dilys quips and reaches for her cup of airport bistro hot chocolate. “So, Timothy. Did you have a good night?”

Tom sips his coffee and resists the urge to complain about the nickname. He shakes his head. “Didn’t sleep nearly enough.”

After he spent a few hours at their after party, drinking too much nasty American beer while unable to locate the rest of the band, Tom ordered a taxi to their hotel for the few hours before they’d leave for the airport. Still, he’s not sure he slept at all.

“What did you think of that party?”

Tom sips his coffee again and makes a face.

“Terrible, weren’t it? The music was _shit_.”

“I just thought everyone there was really boring.” He did spend about twenty minutes chatting to a skinny bird, but he eventually realised that she talked way too much for him to pull her. “Ended up getting a cab back to the hotel when I couldn’t find any of you around.”

“Yeah, we just walked down the block and found another place that seemed much more interesting.”

Dilys makes a gesture with one finger under her nose that can only be interpreted as one thing. Tom hates thinking about what she and Joe do as a couple, although he couldn’t exactly ignore it in the first place.

With a shaky grin, she next says, “I think I win.”

“Yeah, you probably had a better night than I did,” Tom concedes. He throws a cautious glance back to Josh and Faris, who are still in the process of melding into the same entity. “Those two got back just a little later than I did, so the sound of them at it kept me up for at least the next hour.”

Dilys snorts, which very soon turns into a hollow, nasal laugh. “Poor little Tommy,” she says.

Joe lets out a tired giggle. Tom wishes he was in the same drugged-up mindset as either of them, so he could also find this situation funny. Once again, Dilys leans in and drapes an arm around his shoulder.

“Are you _jealous_?”

“I’m not jealous.”

Well, maybe he’s jealous of either of them for getting more sex than he did throughout their short tour, but he likes to think that’s within a healthy realm of human emotion.

“It’s just weird, though, innit? That they’re together all the time.”

A week earlier when they had just landed in New York, they divided the hotel rooms up so Faris could have the lone single, and Tom and Josh and Joe and Dilys would each share a double, but Josh didn’t spend a single night actually sleeping with Tom. Even during the days exploring the city as a band and in their tour bus, he always clung to Faris’ side.

“You’d think if we’re travelling all the way to a different continent, you’d want to spend more time with other people. Shag other people.”

Dilys makes a noise. “You actually think they’re spending all that time _shagging_?”

Tom doesn’t think it’s an actual question, but now it’s his neck that goes hot. He suddenly feels very stupid. Finally, he diplomatically says, “I’ve certainly heard enough of it.”

Another noise, and Dilys takes the water from Joe’s hand to sip it herself. “I think you’re wrong,” she says next, a sombre tone in her voice that Tom wouldn’t have expected. “See, I’ve talked to Faz, and he says they mainly just have lots of deep conversations.”

Tom exhales hollowly and wishes he could have a fag. He chances yet another glance over at those two, only to find this time that Josh has stood up. One more exchange of low words with Faris, then he heads over to the rest of the band.

Tom, after a long second of feeling petrified, remembers to inhale again.

“Hey,” Josh says, voice weary with lack of sleep. “D’you mind if we just… Do you wanna go for a walk?”

Tom shrugs. He gives Dilys and Joe a nod, and Josh takes him on a walk down to an emptier section of the departure hall. Yet another reason for Tom to wish they weren’t on a red-eye flight. A nebulous anxiety settles in his chest, and he looks down at Josh’s white scribbled-on Converse.

“I just wanted to say sorry to you,” Josh says after a split second. His hands burrow deeper into the pockets of his coat, the heavy woollen one that hides all lines of his body. “For basically ignoring you all week and not spending any time with you. Even though we were supposed to be sleeping together.”

Tom takes a moment to understand why his voice turns sheepish with that last sentence. Then, it clicks.

“You think you need to apologise ‘cause we didn’t have sex at all?”

Josh shrugs. “You did seem a bit jealous.”

Back in New York, Dilys insisted on dragging everyone out to the gay clubs for their first two nights in the city, and both times, Josh left in a separate taxi on the arm of a strange man. The heat of the blood rush keeps a steady chokehold around Tom’s neck.

“I was worried about your safety when you pulled those two blokes,” he says. “That’s all.” It’s not all.

Josh fidgets in his coat. “So you don’t hate me now.”

For the second time on this tour, Josh now insinuates that any member of the band may hate him. Tom pleadingly looks back at Joe and Dilys, the air around him suddenly too thick, but they seem again engrossed in their own cokey conversation. Faris, on the other hand, is watching them intently now.

“I don’t hate you,” Tom says, “I could never.”

“Okay.” Josh meekly smiles.

“You and Faris have certainly spent lots of time together recently,” Tom says and immediately puts his foot in his mouth.

“Yeah, I also wanted to apologise for sending you that text last night.”

_R you still at the party? We went down the block 4 takeaway had 2 get the taste of cum frm my mouf_

Tom completely forgot about that message until now, but in all fairness, it arrived when he was in the backseat of his cab lamenting that he had too much to drink.

“Never mind that,” he says.

“Faris did tell me not to send it,” Josh adds, and he grins. “ _Boundaries, Joshua_ ,” he adds in an approximation of Faris’ baritone.

Tom, despite himself, lets a short laugh slip. “But did you end up finding your takeaway you were after?”

“There was a twenty-four-hour McDonalds round the corner. We settled for that.” Again, Josh fidgets. “When we got back to the party afterwards, we thought you three all had left, so we just got a car back to the hotel.”

“That’s funny,” Tom says. On a level and from a distance, it is. “I thought the exact same thing, everyone was gone, so I called a taxi. I literally got your message on my way back.”

“So we literally could’ve gotten one car if we’d been back, like, fifteen minutes earlier?”

“Yeah.” Tom won’t mention how much he doesn’t want to share a confined space with Josh and Faris by themselves. “I just thought that after party was really shit.”

“I think we all did,” Josh quips. After a quiet second, he adds, “It’s just nice to talk to someone who gets how sex stuff can be complicated, and to know that they’re not talking to you ‘cause they want to have sex with you. ‘Cause I don’t think Faz really likes sex, he just does it ‘cause I like it so much, so it’s always on my terms, and that’s really… It’s a nice change, you know?”

Out of reflex, Tom says, “Yeah.” Then, he says, “Oh.”

**Author's Note:**

> neither _Dinner Date_ nor _Take Me Out_ had actually premiered at the point in time this fic takes place, but I threw the reference in for comedic effect.


End file.
